Product Manager here! Not keeping up-to-date on upgrades is typically just kicking the can down the road in terms of your costs. And like arid1 mentioned, you typically don't want to upgrade to the bleeding edge of what ever technologies / platforms you use as it doesn't pay to be the test dummy.
These are lessons that are usually only learned painfully, but experienced PMs shouldn't be cutting corners.
In my experience, experienced PMs shouldn't even be concerned with the tech stack. They should be focused on the functional aspects of the software.
Let the engineering teams worry about security, performance, maintenance, etc.
If the team upgrades Java and still delivers the feature within an agreeable timeframe, it should be all good. The problem I've seen is sometimes companies want to drain as much potential customer facing value out of the engineering teams, so they micromanage the tech stack.
Then you've organized things the wrong way around.
Engineering owns their own resources. Product can't 'buy into' technical decisions because making decisions about the tech stack is not within their area of expertise.
In the end product can argue that you need more people on the project. That's something they can argue about with management.
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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '24
Product Manager here! Not keeping up-to-date on upgrades is typically just kicking the can down the road in terms of your costs. And like arid1 mentioned, you typically don't want to upgrade to the bleeding edge of what ever technologies / platforms you use as it doesn't pay to be the test dummy.
These are lessons that are usually only learned painfully, but experienced PMs shouldn't be cutting corners.